Furniture and cabinet manufacturing typically involves a substantial amount of labor-intensive work in the cutting, shaping and assembly of the articles of furniture. This is true even of box-like furniture items such as desks, chests and cabinets, such as bathroom vanities and upper and lower kitchen cabinets. Generally, such items of furniture are fully assembled at the factory. This results in a relatively bulky structure which requires substantial space for shipping.
Assembly of cabinets or desk pedestals and the like typically requires the use of nails, screws, glue, glue blocks or other fasteners to assure the integral strength and rigidity of the finished article. Final assembly of furniture and cabinets using fasteners of these types requires substantial amounts of labor and materials. This is true even for mass production kitchen cabinet manufacturing plants which utilize many standard or interchangeable parts, assembly jigs, and semi-automatic tools.
Since kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities typically are pre-assembled at a factory and then are shipped to the building site for installation, an additional problem arises in protecting these cabinets and vanities from damage during shipping. Such rectangular cabinets are particularly susceptible to damage from stress applied unevenly to sides or corners of the cabinets. This can cause glue joints to break and distortion of the cabinets in amounts sufficient to cause binding or sticking of drawers or improper fit of doors when such cabinets are later installed at the job site. The potential for damage of this type during shipping is very high; and the repair of cabinets which have been even only slightly misaligned due to shock during shipment, adds substantially to labor time and cost of the completed project. In addition, because of the substantial bulk of pre-assembled cabinets, the shipping space required to ship, for example, a full kitchen or the like, is substantial. Consequently, trucks used for this purpose by cabinet manufacturers and contractors generally are mid-sized or heavy-duty trucks even though the total weight of the load is not particularly high for the volume of space which is required.
Although it may be possible to ship the component parts of conventional modular kitchen cabinets to a job site in a disassembled form, the necessary jigs for maintaining alignment of the various parts during assembly usually are not available at the job site, and such jigs are too cumbersome for use by installers at the job site. In addition, a substantial amount of expensive skilled labor would be required for the nailing and gluing of conventional cabinets if they were to be assembled at the job site.
Consequently, it is desirable to overcome the disadvantages of shipping pre-assembled kitchen cabinets and the like to a job site. If possible, it is preferable to ship the component parts in a knocked-down condition since all of the parts of such cabinets comprise flat sheets of material. In addition, it is desirable to construct the component parts of a kitchen cabinet which can be readily and accurately assembled at a job site without requiring additional fasteners such as nails, screws, glue or the like and without requiring any special jigs or tools.